cargo-deny

Changed

• PR#881 refactored the CLI, moving some duplicated options/flags into the root and removing several deprecated options/flags/values. See the PR for a full list of changes.

Added

• PR#879 resolved #873 by adding a new bans.std-replacements lint which checks the graph for crates.io sourced crates that have been partially or fully replaced in std and/or core.

Fixed

• PR#880 resolved #765 by respecting non-default build script paths in manifests.
• PR#881 resolved #874 by cleaning up the CLI, deduplicating some options/flags that caused the bug in the list subcommand.

Fixed

• PR#884 fixed snapshot filenames on Windows which caused the release binary publish to fail...again.

Fixed

• PR#883 fixed snapshot filenames on Windows which caused the release binary publish to fail.

Changed

• PR#881 refactored the CLI, moving some duplicated options/flags into the root and removing several deprecated options/flags/values. See the PR for a full list of changes.

Added

• PR#879 resolved #873 by adding a new bans.std-replacements lint which checks the graph for crates.io sourced crates that have been partially or fully replaced in std and/or core.

Fixed

• PR#880 resolved #765 by respecting non-default build script paths in manifests.
• PR#881 resolved #874 by cleaning up the CLI, deduplicating some options/flags that caused bug in the list subcommand.

Added

• PR#866 added sources.unused-allowed-org

Fixed

• PR#870 resolved #868 by spawning scoped threads directly, allowing forward progress even on severely constrained thread pool counts.
• PR#871 resolved #869 by ignoring wildcards on crates that depend on themselves.

Added

• PR#866 added sources.unused-allowed-org

Fixed

• PR#870 resolved #868 by spawning scoped threads directly, allowing forward progress even on severely constrained thread pool counts.
• PR#871 resolved #869 by ignoring wildcards on crates that depend on themselves.

Fixed

• PR#864 fixed matching of ^ and ~ with on prerelease versions for when checking if a crate is affected by an advisory. As of the time of the PR, this literally affected none of published versions of any crate with an advisory, but this just ensures such a case will be handled in the future.

Fixed

• PR#864 fixed matching of ^ and ~ with on prerelease versions for when checking if a crate is affected by an advisory. As of the time of the PR, this literally affected none of published versions of any crate with an advisory, but this just ensures such a case will be handled in the future.

Changed

• PR#860 updated crates, resolving krates#111.

Changed

• PR#860 updated crates, resolving krates#111.

Fixed

• PR#854 resolved #854 by removing environment variables that affect repo paths before cloning or fetching the advisory database.

Fixed

• PR#854 resolved #854 by removing environment variables that affect repo paths before cloning or fetching the advisory database.

Fixed

• PR#857 fixed a segfault reported in #855.

Fixed

• PR#857 fixed a segfault reported in #855.

Fixed

• PR#847 and PR#848 resolved #846, which was an advisory parsing bug that only affected Windows.

Fixed

• PR#847 and PR#848 resolved #846, which was an advisory parsing bug that only affected Windows.

Fixed

• PR#847 resolved #846, which only affected Windows.

Fixed

• PR#845 fixed structural issues with SARIF output, resolving #818. Thanks @KyleChamberlin!

Fixed

• PR#833 fixed an issue where the maximum advisory database staleness was over 14 years instead of the intended 90 days.
• PR#839 fixed an issue where unsound advisories would appear for transitive dependencies despite requesting them only for workspace dependencies, resolving #829.
• PR#840 resolved #797 by passing --filter-platform when collecting cargo metadata if only a single target was requested either in the config or via the command line.
• PR#841 fixed an issue where --frozen would not disable fetching of the advisory DB, resolving #759.
• PR#842 and PR#844 updated crates. Notably krates was updated to resolve two issues with crates being pruned from the graph used when running checks. Resolving these two issues may mean that updating cargo-deny may highlight issues that were previously hidden.
  • EmbarkStudios/krates#106 would fail to pull in crates brought in via a feature if that crate had its lib target renamed by the package author.
  • EmbarkStudios/krates#109 would fail to bring in optional dependencies if they were brought in by a weak feature in a crate also brought in by a weak feature.

Changed

• PR#830 removed gix in favor of shelling out to git. This massively improves build times and eases maintenance as gix bumps minor versions quite frequently. If cargo-deny is used in an environment that for some reason allows internet access but doesn't have git available, the advisory database would need to be updated before calling cargo-deny.
• PR#838 removed rustsec in favor of manually implemented advisory parsing and checking, with a nightly cron job that checks that the implementation exactly matches rustsec on the official rustsec advisory db.

Changed

• PR#802 made relative paths passed to --config be resolved relative to the current working directory (rather than the resolved manifest path's directory).
• PR#825 updated gix, reqwest, and tame-index to newer versions. The reqwest 0.13 changes means it is no longer possible to choose the source of root certificates for gix, so that decision is now left to rustls-platform-verifier. The native-certs feature has thus been removed, and cargo-deny no longer defaults to using webpki-roots.

Fixed

• PR#802 fixed path handling of paths passed to --config, resolving #748.
• PR#819 added locations to all SARIF results since that's mandatory for valid SARIF.
• PR#821 fixed compilation on an Alpine host.

Added

• PR#795 added [bans.allow-workspace] to allow workspace crates while denying all external crates.
• PR#800 added [licenses.include-build] to toggle whether build dependencies are included in the license check.
• PR#823 added [advisories.unused-ignored-advisory] to disable the warning when an advisory is ignored but not encountered in the crate graph.
• PR#826 added [advisories.unsound] to determine which crates can show unsound advisories, similarly to the unmaintained field. Defaults to workspace crates, ignoring unsound advisories for transitive dependencies, resolving #824.

Fixed

• PR#817 resolved #816 by making most license integration tests just return success if I or CI am not the one running them.

Fixed

• PR#814 now allows deprecated license identifiers if they are detected from text, which was broken in 0.18.7. Additionally, when a GNU license (GPL, AGPL, LGPL, GFDL) license is detected, it is always detected as the -or-later variant, arbitrarily chosen as it is impossible to distinguish between the variants for a particular license version. This means if the license detected is actually wrong (eg. GPL-3.0-or-later is detected when the code is actually licensed under GPL-3.0-only), the license should instead be clarified to the correct one. Resolves #813.

Changed

• PR#812 updated spdx to 0.13, allowing cargo-deny to remove the askalono dependency but still support license detection.

Fixed

• PR#805 updated rustsec to 0.31, resolving #804.
• PR#810 resolved #809 by printing the crate name and version when its manifest does not contain a license expression.

Added

• PR#807 added the unused-license-exception option to configure the lint level, resolving #806.

Changed

• PR#808 updated gix to 0.75.

Changed

• PR#789 changed it so that release binaries are now built with LTO.
• PR#790 and PR#794 updated various crates.

Added

• PR#790 added SARIF as an output format, usable via --format sarif. The current output for this format is experimental and may change in future updates.

Added

• PR#779 added the --metadata-path argument to use a cargo metadata JSON file instead of calling cargo metadata, resolving #777.
• PR#782 added sources.unused-allow-source to allow configuration of the lint level when a source is allowed but not used by any crate in the graph, closing #781.

Changed

• PR#786 changed the license check output. / is no longer corrected to OR, and if the license expression is found in the package's manifest, that span is used in diagnostic messages instead of the synthesized manifest.

Fixed

• PR#786 resolved #784 by updating spdx to a new version that forces all GNU licenses to be exactly equal when comparing license expressions to licensee expressions, which is incredibly pedantic, but means the license comparison is entirely in the hands of the user so that I no longer have to deal with GNU licenses.

Changed

• PR#773 changed cargo-deny's duplicate detection to automatically ignore versions whose only dependent is another version of the same crate.

Added

• PR#753 resolved #752 by adding back the advisories.unmaintained config option. See the docs for how it can be used. The default matches the current behavior, which is to error on any unmaintained advisory, but adding unmaintained = "workspace" to the [advisories] table will mean unmaintained advisories will only error if the crate is a direct dependency of your workspace.

Fixed

• PR#749 updated krates to pull in the fix for EmbarkStudios/krates#100.

Changed

• PR#746 changed the directory naming of advisory databases, again, so the name uses the last path component and a different, but also stable, hashing algorithm. Eg. the default https://github.com/rustsec/advisory-db will now be placed in $CARGO_HOME/advisory-dbs/advisory-db-3157b0e258782691.
• PR#746 changed the MSRV to 1.85.0 and uses edition 2024.

Fixed

• PR#746 fixes an issue when using cargo 1.85.0 where source urls were not being properly assigned to crates.io due to the constant being used no longer matching the new path used in cargo 1.85.0 causing eg. workspace dependency checks to fail.

Changed

• PR#745 updated tame-index to 0.18.0 so that cargo 1.85.0 is transparently supported along with older cargo versions.
• PR#745 now uses the same stable hashing as cargo 1.85.0 for the advisory databases, which changes their path, but will notably now be the same across all host platforms.

Changed

• PR#742 updated gix to 0.70, to resolve RUSTSEC-2025-0001.

Fixed

• PR#739 fixed an issue where sources could match even if the hostname was not the same.

Changed

• PR#721 updated rust-version to 1.81.0 to accurately reflect the minimum rust version required to compile, resolving #720.
• PR#722 updated the SPDX license list to 3.25.0.

Fixed

• PR#726 resolved #725 by adding the unnecessary-skip diagnostic, emitted when there is a skip configured for a crate that only has one version in the graph.

Fixed

• PR#703 resolved #696 by no longer emitting errors when failing to deserialize deprecated fields, and removed some lingering documentation that wasn't removed in PR#611.
• PR#719 updated to krates -> 0.17.5, fixing an issue where cargo-deny could panic due to incorrectly resolving features for different versions of the same crate referenced by a single crate.
• PR#719 resolved #706 by removing a warning issued when users use ignored scheme modifiers for source urls.
• PR#719 resolved #718 by updating the book with missing arguments.

Added

• PR#715 resolved #714 by adding support for Edition 2024. Thanks @kpcyrd!
• PR#710 resolved #708 by allowing for unpublished workspace crates to be excluded from the dependency graph that checks are run against, either via the --exclude-unpublished CLI argument or the graph.exclude-unpublished config field. Thanks @Tastaturtaste!

Changed

• PR#711 updated goblin -> 0.9.2
• PR#713 updated various crates, notably rustsec -> 0.30.

Fixed

• PR#691 fixed an issue where workspace dependencies that used the current dir '.' path component would incorrectly trigger the unused-workspace-dependency lint.

Removed

• PR#681 finished the deprecation introduced in PR#611, making the usage of the deprecated fields into errors.

[advisories]

The following fields have all been removed in favor of denying all advisories by default. To ignore an advisory the ignore field can be used as before.

• vulnerability - Vulnerability advisories are now deny by default
• unmaintained - Unmaintained advisories are now deny by default
• unsound - Unsound advisories are now deny by default
• notice - Notice advisories are now deny by default
• severity-threshold - The severity of vulnerabilities is now irrelevant

[licenses]

The following fields have all been removed in favor of denying all licenses that are not explicitly allowed via either allow or exceptions.

• unlicensed - Crates whose license(s) cannot be confidently determined are now always errors. The clarify field can be used to help cargo-deny determine the license.
• allow-osi-fsf-free - The OSI/FSF Free attributes are now irrelevant, only whether it is explicitly allowed.
• copyleft - The copyleft attribute is now irrelevant, only whether it is explicitly allowed.
• default - The default is now deny.
• deny - All licenses are now denied by default, this field added nothing.

Changed

• PR#685 follows up on PR#673, moving the fields that were added to their own separate bans.workspace-dependencies section. This is an unannounced breaking change but is fairly minor and 0.15.0 was never released on github actions so the amount of people affected by this will be (hopefully) small. This also makes the workspace duplicate detection off by default since the field is optional, but makes it so that if not specified workspace duplicates are now deny instead of warn.

Fixed

• PR#685 resolved #682 by adding the include-path-dependencies field, allowing path dependencies to be ignored if it is false.

Fixed

• PR#681 fixed #680 by always stripping .git from urls when matching sources to resolved nodes as they are allowed, but (generally) have no semantic meaning and are stripped by cargo when emitting metadata.

Added

• PR#673 added linting of [workspace.dependencies], resolving #436 and #525.
  • Added lint workspace-duplicates, which allows checking for missing usage of workspace = true for direct workspace dependencies that are used more than once in the workspace.
  • Added lint unused-workspace-dependencies, which allows checking for dependencies declared in [workspace.dependencies] that aren't actually used.

Changed

• PR#673 changed how span information for workspace dependencies worked, which meant improvements were made to the output for the bans.wildcards lint. Previously fake cargo manifests were created that weren't even necessarily valid toml files, however now the actual cargo manifests are used, meaning that the lint will now point to the correct file and line location of the dependency declaration that uses a wildcard.
• PR#675 changed the utf-8 characters used in rendering diagnostics, inspired by rust-lang/rust#126597.
• PR#676 updated notably gix -> 0.64 (and tame-index).

Fixed

• PR#668 resolved #667 by adding a missing feature flag to allow local cargo registry support.

Changed

• PR#663 updated some crates, notably gix -> 0.63 (and tame-index).

Fixed

• PR#657 resolved #652 by fixing an issue where the exit code was incorrect if logging was disabled.

Added

• PR#659 adding publishing of aarch64-unknown-linux-musl binaries.

Changed

• PR#653 updated jobserver -> 0.1.30
• PR#656 updated gix -> 0.62.0, reqwest -> 0.12.4, tame-index -> 0.11.0

Fixed

• PR#643 resolved #629 by making the hosted git (github, gitlab, bitbucket) org/user name comparison case-insensitive. Thanks @pmnlla!
• PR#649 fixed an issue where depending on the same crate multiple times by using different cfg()/triple targets could cause features to be resolved incorrectly and thus crates to be not pulled into the graph used for checking.

Fixed

• PR#642 resolved #641 by pinning gix-transport (and its unique dependencies) to 0.41.2 as a workaround for cargo install not using the lockfile. See this issue for more information.

Changed

• PR#639 updated tame-index to avoid an error if you don't used --locked.

Fixed

• PR#638 resolved #636 by updating krates.

Changed

• PR#631 improved the diagnostic for when the yank check fails due to some issue with retrieving or reading the index information.
• PR#633 updated gix -> 0.60.

Fixed

• PR#626 resolved #625 by explicitly checking that a license identified as Pixar was actually (probably) the Pixar license, instead of a normal Apache-2.0 license.

Added

• PR#618 added metadata notes to diagnostics when a license is rejected, as well as removing span information for accepted licenses unless the log level is info or higher to make the diagnostic clearer by default.

Fixed

• PR#617 resolved #576 by updating the SPDX license list to 3.23.

Fixed

• PR#615 fixed an issue introduced in PR#605 where the various bans diagnostic codes could not have their lint level changed via the CLI. It also introduced the deprecated diagnostic code.

Changed

• PR#605 did a major refactor of configuration, both how it is deserialized and changing (hopefully improving) many options.
• PR#605 moved targets, exclude, all-features, features, no-default-features, and exclude into the [graph] table.
• PR#605 moved feature-depth into the [output] table.

Added

• PR#613 added support for basic shell expansion to advisories.db-path, which expands support beyond just ~ to include environment variable expansion.

Fixed

• PR#601 resolved #600 by outputting the correct spans when a license was both allowed and denied.
• PR#605 resolved #264 be replacing toml and serde with toml-span.
• PR#605 resolved #539 by simplifying the very common name = "<crate_name>", version = "<requirements>" used to target specific crates into either a plain package spec string or the simpler crate = "<package spec>".
• PR#605 resolved #578 by adding a reason = "<reason>" field to many fields within the configuration that are provided in diagnostics. [bans.deny] also has an additional use-instead = "<url/crate_name>". PR#610 did this for the advisories.ignore field.
• PR#605 resolved #579 by allowing yanked crates to be ignored by specifying a PackageSpec in the [advisories.ignore] array.

Deprecated

• PR#606 and PR#611 together deprecated several fields listed below. See PR#611 for how to change your config to opt-in to the new behavior that will become the default when the deprecated fields are removed in a future minor version.
  • [advisories]
    • vulnerability
    • unmaintained
    • unsound
    • notice
    • severity-threshold
  • [licenses]
    • unlicensed
    • allow-osi-fsf-free
    • copyleft
    • default
    • deny

Fixed

• PR#599 resolved #488 by treating git and path sources differently. Thanks @kpreid!

Fixed

• PR#596 updated krates again to pull in krates#77.

Fixed

• PR#594 updated krates again to pull in krates#75.

Fixed

• PR#592 updated krates again to pull in krates#73.

Fixed

• PR#591 updated krates again to pull in krates#71.

Fixed

• PR#590 updated krates to fix an issue with crates that directly have a dependency on 2 or more versions of the same crate.

Added

• PR#590 resolved #405 by emitting warnings when a wrapper crate for a banned crate does not have a dependency on that crate.

Changed

• PR#591 updated gix and tame-index.

Fixed

• PR#588 resolved an issue introduced in [0.14.4] where features that reference dev-only dependencies in non-workspace crates would cause a panic.

Fixed

• PR#586 resolved 2 issues with crate graph creation, see krates#60 and krates#64 for more details.

Fixed

• PR#566 updated tame-index to obtain OS file locking, resolving #537. This change means that cargo-deny should not encounter issues such as those described in this rustsec issue since we no longer use gix::lock locking advisory databases, and makes reading the crates.io index safer by respecting the lock used by cargo itself.

Added

• PR#545 added the ability to specify additional license exceptions via additional configuration files.
• PR#549 added the bans.build configuration option, opting in to checking for file extensions, native executables, and interpreted scripts. This resolved #43.

Changed

• PR#557 introduced changes to how dev-dependencies are handled. By default, crates that are only used as dev-dependencies (ie, there are no normal nor build dependency edges linking them to other crates) will no longer be considered when checking for multiple-versions violations. This can be re-enabled via the bans.multiple-versions-include-dev config field. Additionally, licenses are no longer checked for dev-dependencies, but can be re-enabled via licenses.include-dev the config field. dev-dependencies can also be completely disabled altogether, but this applies to all checks, including advisories and sources, so is not enabled by default. This behavior can be enabled by using the exclude-dev field, or the --exclude-dev command line flag. This change resolved #322, #329, #413 and #497.

Fixed

• PR#549 fixed #548 by correctly locating cargo registry indices from an git ssh url.
• PR#549 fixed #552 by correctly handling signal interrupts and removing the advisory-dbs lock file.
• PR#549 fixed #553 by adding the native-certs feature flag that can enable the OS native certificate store.

Deprecated

• PR#549 moved bans.allow-build-scripts to bans.build.allow-build-scripts. bans.allow-build-scripts is still supported, but emits a warning.

Fixed

• PR#544 updated dependencies, notably tame-index 0.2.5 which fixed this issue

Changed

• PR#538 resolved #483 by emitting exit codes as a bitset of the individual checks that failed, allowing scripts to handle checks separately from a single run. This could affect users who check exactly for the exit code being 1, as that will now only be emitted if the advisories, but no other, check fails.

Changed

• PR#520 resolved #522 by completely removing all dependencies upon git2 and openssl. This was done by transitioning from git2 -> gix for all git operations, both directly in this crate, as well as replacing crates-index with tame-index.
• PR#520 bumped the MSRV from 1.65.0 -> 1.70.0
• PR#523 added "(try cargo update -p <crate_name>)" when an advisory is detected for a crate. Thanks @Victor-N-Suadicani!

Fixed

• PR#520 resolved #361 by printing output when a fetch is being performed to clarify what is taking time.
• PR#520 (possibly) resolved #435 by switching all git operations from git2 to gix.
• PR#520 resolved #439 by using minimal refspecs for cloning and fetching all remote git repositories (indices or advisory databases) where only the remote HEAD is needed to update the local repository, regardless of the default remote branch pointed to by HEAD.
• PR#520 resolved #446 by ensuring (and testing) that crates from non-registry sources are not checked for advisories, eg. in the case that a local crate is named and versioned the same as a crate from crates.io that has an advisory that affects it.
• PR#520 resolved #515 by always opening the correct registry index based upon the environment.
• PR#531 resolved #210 by adding osi and fsf options to licenses.allow-osi-fsf-free. Thanks @zkxs!
• PR#533 resolved #521 and #524 by allowing clarifications to add files that are used to verify the license information is up to date, rather than needing to match one of the license files that was discovered.
• PR#534 resolved #479 by improving how advisory databases are cloned and/or fetched, notably each database now uses gix's file-based locking to ensure that only one process has mutable access to an advisory database repo at a time.

Removed

• PR#520 removed all features, notably standalone. This is due to cargo still being in transition from git2 -> gix and having no way to compiled without OpenSSL. Once cargo is a better state with regards to this we can add back that feature.

Fixed

• PR#506 replaced atty (unmaintained) with is-terminal. Thanks @tottoto!
• PR#511 resolved #494, #507, and #510 by fixing up how and when urls are normalized.
• PR#512 resolved #509 by fixing casing of the root configuration keys.
• PR#513 resolved #508 by correctly using the crates.io sparse index when checking for yanked crates if specified by the user, as well as falling back to the regular git index if the sparse index is not present.

Added

• PR#504 (though really PR#365) resolved #350 by adding the deny-multiple-versions field to bans.deny entries, allowing specific crates to deny multiple versions while allowing/warning on them more generally. Thanks @leops!
• PR#493 resolved #437 by also looking for deny configuration files in .cargo. Thanks @DJMcNab!
• PR#502 resolved #500 by adding initial support for sparse indices.

Fixed

• PR#503 resolved #498 by falling back to more lax parsing of the SPDX expression of crate if fails to parse according to the stricter but more correct rules.

Fixed

• PR#491 resolved #490 by building libgit2 from vendored sources instead of relying on potentially outdated packages.

Changed

• PR#489 updated dependencies, notably clap, cargo, and git2

Added

• PR#485 added this project and repository to our Security Bug Bounty Program and has Private vulnerability reporting enabled. See SECURITY.md for more details.
• PR#487 added allow-wildcard-paths, fixing #488 by allowing wildcards to be denied, but allowing them for internal, private crates. Thanks @sribich!

Fixed

• PR#489 fixed an issue where git sources where branch=master would be incorrectly categorized as not specifying the branch (ie use HEAD of default branch).